Dimensional

I had the enormous pleasure of traveling to Andalusia, Spain last summer to attend Hamza Yusuf‘s Rihla program. There, I met individuals from all over the world including the United States, United Kingdom, Egypt, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as several visiting scholars and teachers of Islam who lead classes and discussions regarding spiritual matters.

Personal photograph, Great Mosque of Alhambra

One of my favorite scholars was Timothy Winter, also known as Abdal Hakim Murad, who is a British Muslim researcher, writer, columnist and teacher at Cambridge University. He had the uncanny ability to convey the most critical and substantial truths about our lives as humans and distill them into simplest and most straightforward words.

I came upon one of his lessons today online and felt the urgent need to share. For those of us who believe in one Creator, this may be of benefit:

There is a story which Jalaluddin Rumi tells of an ant that’s creeping across the carpet in a mosque, and the ant complains to God saying: “What is this – these bumps, and strange colours, and patterns, this must have been created just as a meaningless obstacle course, what a futile thing to have made.”

But of course the carpet maker, looking at it from above can see the patterns and the purpose of it, and can see that the whole thing is perfect and is good. And [God] is often like that. We often can’t make sense of the misfortunes because we are too dimensional, we are at ground level, we can’t see what it all means, but [God] knows even if we can’t always see that this is a manifestation of [His] will which is always good and always perfect and always beautiful.

–Abdal Hakim Murad

[From http://verbage.wordpress.com/]

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This year, may all of us have ease through our difficulties and in finding the beauty in all things.